There are so many ways this can be done that I think you are not thinking of.

No, I can think of countless ways to do this. I do this kind of thing every single day.

What I’m saying is that you need to account for every possibility. You need to isolate all the deleted comments that fit the criteria of the “Reddit Exodus”.

How do you do that? Do you narrow it down to a timeframe?

The easiest way to do this is identify all deleted accounts, find the backup with the most recent version of their profile with non-deleted comments, and insert that user back into the main database (not the prod db).

Now you need to parse billions upon billions upon billions of records. And yes, it’s billions because you need the system to search through all the records to know which record fits the parameters. And you need to do that across multiple backups for each deleted profile/comment.

It’s a lot of work. And what’s the payoff? A few good comments and a ton of “yes this ^” comments.

I sincerely doubt it’s worth the effort.

Edit: formatting

It can be done quite easily, trust me.

The words of every junior dev right before I have to spend a weekend undoing their crap.

I’ve been there too many times.

There are always edge cases you need to account for, and you can’t account for them until you run tests and then verify the results.

And you’d be parsing billions upon billions of records. Not a trivial thing to do when running multiple tests to verify. And ultimately for what is a trivial payoff.

You don’t screw around with infinitely invaluable prod data of your business without exhausting every single possibility of data modification.

It’s a piece of cake.

It hurts how often I’ve heard this and how often it’s followed by a massive screw up.

It’s theoretically possible, but the issue that anyone trying to do that would run into is consistency.

How do you restore the snapshots of a database to recover deleted comments but also preserve other comments newer than the snapshot date?

The answer is that it’s nearly impossible. Not impossible, but not worth the massive monumental effort when you can just focus on existing comments which greatly outweigh any deleted ones.

I’ve tried a lot of scenarios and languages with various LLMs. The biggest takeaway I have is that AI can get you started on something or help you solve some issues. I’ve generally found that anything beyond a block or two of code becomes useless. The more it generates the more weirdness starts popping up, or it outright hallucinates.

For example, today I used an LLM to help me tighten up an incredibly verbose bit of code. Today was just not my day and I knew there was a cleaner way of doing it, but it just wasn’t coming to me. A quick “make this cleaner: <code>” and I was back to the rest of the code.

This is what LLMs are currently good for. They are just another tool like tab completion or code linting

Linux is sadly very messy for a sysadmin.

wut?